Coming from an iRacing/TradingPaints background, the WTLive “custom paint” is a feature that is, like… so close to being perfect.
- There’s the existing decal system.
- There’s the existing paid “Author Paint” system where (by supporting the Author and Gaijin both with your purchase) everyone can see a custom skin that have on your vehicle.
- There is the existing free WTLive “Personal Paint” system where you can download and apply an ‘approved’ paint that you got from Gaijin-maintained and moderated WTLive.
As a long-time iRacer - what’s missing?
Background (skip if you like): iRacing has a very unofficial relationship with a service called TradingPaints. It’s separate from iRacing because NASCAR and Formula1 are iRacing partners, and there needs to be a wink wink, nudge nudge that those trademarks and logos are all being used without permission by the USER. iRacing’s ‘defense’ is that iRacing provides its own painting system. TradingPaints ‘defense’ is that they merely host user-provided content like an Imgur or DeviantArt (and they have their own painting tool with their own fictional logos on top of that)
But the upshot is that TradingPaints has a utility that enables you to:
- Enable custom paints display in the iRacing Client.
- Select (or upload) a custom paint to your TradingPaints account.
- Everyone else also does that, too (basically) - either creating their own, or selecting one someone else made.
- The result is that every car in the race has its own custom paint displayed, and everyone in the lobby sees it.
Gaijin could (I think? I don’t know the actual software architecture) set up a similar system for War Thunder fairly easily.
- Create and upload (or select from an existing) paint on WTLive (with a sensible size limit for ‘sharable’ paints of 15-25 MB)
- The paint is downloaded to your system by the WT Client and stored in the same place you stick WTLive paints today.
- When you join a match, the client already has a list of who’s in the match, and any paints you don’t have, you collect while the match sets up and initializes. (this is what TradingPaints does - it starts getting the paints when the matchmaker assigns you to a session)
- YAY! Everyone who has those options turned on can see the custom paints on everyone’s vehicles.
Notes over ‘objections’ and ‘what about…’ from discussions I’ve already had:
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“Getting every paint from every match will increase storage space by A LOT.”
Nah. Trading Paints files are between 4-16 MB. Having a look on WTLive, most paints seem to be in the same range - 4-25 MB.
I have 941 paints stored taking up 10 GB - only because I haven’t cleaned out my /paints folder since June of 2021. Doing the “growth over time” math, that’s about 54 MB per week without a sensible automated removal mechanism for older unused paints (say, anything that hasn’t been used in 30/60/90 days or something.
Limiting it to just a month’s worth of paint is: 125 paints consuming 800 MB. works out to a whopping 1% increase over the 79.85 GB that the WarThunder client takes up on disk just…being a game. Hardly worth quibbling about. -
If you do that, then why would anyone buy the Author Paints? That whole thing collapses.
- 2 Years iRacing Subscription is $160 (on Black Friday).
- TradingPaints Pro is another $50 per 2 years. Let’s call it $8.75/mo between the two.
- WarThunder Premium is $159.96 for 2 years (180 days at $39.99, four times). Call it $6.67 per/mo.
- Using the Custom Paints feature becomes another benefit to having a Premium account - and there’s (small) incentive to subscribe for longer terms, I suppose.
- Similar to TradingPaints, anyone (with Premium) could upload a paint to WTLive, or could select any WTLive paint that’s been flagged “shared” by the author for people to use with their vehicles.
- WarThunder Client would download users paints as part of session initialization (much like TradingPaints does - it checks to see if it already has it, and fetches only new ones)
- The “Author” system could pivot to a small monthly royalty based on how many users are actively using that Authored paint, rather than the current one-time payment (of a 70/30 split or whatever of the $3.30 that represents the current 500 GE purchase price)
- The system is fine the way it is.
This is kind of a terrible reason to not innovate. Don’t break what’s already working, but don’t say no because you, personally, don’t like or wouldn’t use it.
Of course there would be an option for Premium Users to uncheck in settings so that (like today) you never see anyone’s custom paints if you don’t want to, or are on a metered connection, or have a tiny disk that doesn’t have room for anything, or whatever.
But there was a guy in one of my Air RB matches last week who wished that we all could see his black chrome F-104.
And I wish I could see his black chrome F-104, too.
And I don’t see any outstanding technical reason why I couldn’t - aside from it not having been suggested based on the technical implementation of a virtually identical feature that’s already implemented in another game…
Thoughts?
“What about…” X or Y or Z that I haven’t considered (that aren’t “I don’t like it”, “I personally wouldn’t use it” or “everything is so tiny you’d never see anything anyway” (ahem…replays. Takeoffs in Air RB. Spawning in during GB and SB. You’d see them plenty))
- Yes
- No